White, young, female - perfect for the job

"All people are equal, but some are more equal than others" (based on George Orwell's 'Animal Farm' - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal then others")

Sexism, ageism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia. They are realities of the societies we live in; they are realities that we face on the playground as kids, in school as teenagers, and at the workplace as adults.

As human begins we tend to be scared of things and people that are different from us and react to that fear accordingly: by discriminating. Diversity is all about learning to identify, recognize, accept and value these differences - they are what make us what we are, what makes us uniquely special, valuable and exceptional.

Margaret Anderson and Patricia Collins offer a definition of diversity that sums up the main notions that other authors have tackled in regard to the subject: “Diversity is about an awareness of and sensitivity to the intersections of race, class and gender, about seeing linkages to other categories of analysis, including sexuality, age, religion, physical disability, national identity and ethnicity, and about appreciating the disparities of power that produce social inequities (2006, p. 1).

Accepting differences, leaving prejudices and intolerance aside, is a hard step to take for many; but getting to value and celebrate these differences is what truly matters and where the real challenge appears.

If there is a field out there that would mostly benefit from embracing differences - building a team around a group of religion, age, gender and ethnically diverse people - that is the communication industry. What profession, other than being a communicator, would benefit more from being able to send out a large array of culturally and ethnically loaded messages? And what other profession than public relations would benefit more from understanding the population dynamics of race and ethnicity? There isn't a bigger influence on building successful relationships with constituent groups than diversity.

Having an age, gender and ethnically diverse team would benefit a PR company in more than one way: it would attract a larger palette of clients, it would help deliver more complex and target-specific strategies, and it would promote and demonstrate a deeper understanding of the public and audiences.

There is nothing less constructive than stereotyping people according to race, gender, religion etc; these oversimplified human perceptions oppress individuals and groups, as they are reduced by inaccurate judgments. Judging people according to stereotypes means that they carry a mark, which makes them unable to show off their true, unique, individual capabilities and their creative personalities get lost on the way.  (For a bit of comic relief here's a video that perfectly plays on the stereotypes of men vs women.)

International public relations practitioners face even greater diversity, operating “across time zones, within different political, economic, and social systems and with varying media constraints” (Wakefield, 2008, p. 141). Global PR professional seek relationships with multinational populations that differ in race, national income, literacy, religion, culture, technology, governance, and language. According to GeoHive, over 60 % of the world population is Asian, 14 % is African, approximately 11% lives in Europe and only about 5 percent lives in North America. According to adherents.com 33% of the world populations is Christian, 21% Islamic, 14% Hindu, 6% Buddhist, 6% Chinese-traditional, 6% primal-indigenous, 2% other and 16% non-religious.

The traits and attributes that make a PR professional the best in his or her field are flexibility, respect, empathy, having a strong cultural and ethnical self-awareness, mastering conflict resolution, cross-cultural communication and language development skills. And these attributes are best perfected by knowing how to value and embrace differences, while working in diverse environments.

None of these facts represent a novelty; people in the industry are aware of their bearing and significance. And still PR is dominated by white, middle-class females and run by white middle class men. How can PR pros provide the requisite variety to organizations to help them reach their audiences and objectives, if they are themselves insufficiently diverse?

PR is an overwhelmingly 'white' profession that offers few, if any, high-profile role models from minority groups. This low visibility of these groups is a big problem for the industry and can become a true cornerstone for the future of public relations. Which means that a vital priority for the profession right now is breaking down entry barriers for all minorities and encouraging diversity, from an ethical, legal, business-oriented, HR and technical perspective.

A lot of attention has been given to the issue of diversity by the CIPR, who has a special website dedicated to it. Visitors can go there to find out more about what is being done in this matter, to see the diversity policy, download case studies or read testimonials of people from all background who are making a name for themselves in PR.

References:

• Margaret Anderson, Patricia Collins’s, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, Wadsworth Publishing, 2006
• Robert I. Wakefield, Theory of International Public Relations, the Internet, and Activism: A Personal Reflection, in Journal of Public Relations Research, Volume 20, Issue 1, January 2008, pp. 138 - 157
• http://www.cipr.co.uk/diversity/index.htm, accesed March 4, 2010

Global PR and cultural dimensions

"Culture hides more than it reveals and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from it’s own participants. Years of study have convinced me that the real job is not to understand foreign culture but to understand our own" - Edward T. Hall

Our class discussion today about global/ international PR led us to Edward Hall's concepts of high and low context cultures from his 1976 'Beyond culture' and to Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

 

Going through them was meant to make us understand why sometimes we *don't understand* each other all that well. And by 'we' I mean everyone from PR professionals working in multinationals to the incredibly culturally diverse group that is our class.

It got me thinking about some of the issues that came up in the group work that we've done the past semester. It was strange, at the time, seeing how dissimilar we all approached the same assignment and how differently we interacted with each other. But putting everything through Hall's and Hofstede's perspective, things started to make sense.

So in the interest of getting people to understand me better and getting myself to understand the outside world better in future similar situations, I started mapping out some of my cultural dimensions, according to Hofstede's research and the way this study attributes them to the Romanian culture.

According to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and estimations, Romania tends to be a culture that has a low uncertainty avoidance ranking, which indicates that “the society accepts more rapidly change and takes more and greater risks”, and is less rule-oriented. It also has a short-term orientation, as long-term traditions and commitments are not impediments to changes. Other indicators are: high power distance index reflecting presence of inequality of power and health within society and deference to authority figures, low individualism which expresses the collectivistic nature of society with close tights between individuals, and high masculinity pointing out a high degree of gender differentiation. (Source)

Summing up this study's findings (study developed by 3 Romanian researchers in the field of cross-cultural communication), Romanian culture has:

- A high Power Distance Index, corresponding to an efficient mechanism for preservation and distinguishing status differences; the index is mainly characterized through arbitrary leadership and an inclination towards indiscipline.

- A very low Individualism Index => it's a culture characterized by collectivism, which means that, within it, it's normal to expect help from the community. There also is a certain lack of initiative, a contra productive view of private property and group interests always take precedence.

- Medium Masculinity, with a slight tendency towards femininity. There is, however, a lack of homogeneity within this dimension: the Romanian culture has both extremely masculine tendencies (such as acute differences between male and female behaviours) and pronounced feminine ones (like egalitarianism, a negative view of wealthy people, attraction towards convenience etc.)

- An above average Uncertainty Avoidance Index, dimension characterized by the presence of opposed tendencies: on the one hand there are strong avoidance elements - related to the social impact of religion or the authorities' need for control - and on the other hand, uncertainty acceptance elements, such as casualness, indifference or lack of strictness , are not uncommon.

- Medium values for long term orientation, a consequence of the existing traditionalism and of the ease of change at the superficial level.

The results of the study vary in certain areas from those estimated by Hofstede.

Taking a look at Edward Hall's theory on low and high context cultures, I would immediately classify Romanian as the latter.   

In a high context culture, such as mine, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture itself explain them. Words and word choice become very important in higher context communication: a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group. But, at the same time, they do it much less effectively outside that group. This differs from lower context cultures, such as German, American or Scandinavian ones, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.

Knowing and being aware of your cultural dimensions is the first step of practicing PR in a global environment. After assimilating this, the next step is becoming aware and understanding the dimensions that apply to the people you work with and for. If you are able to successfully and open-mindedly go through these steps, your work as an international PR practitioner has just been way simplified.

Global Village PR

“Good PR is always context and culture specific. The idea of a global PR is anathema” - debate statement

Great debate today revolving around global vs local PR. Is good PR always context and culture specific or can you also practice an efficient and effective international or global PR?

Both teams brought great arguments to support and defend their sides, but at the end I think we all could basically agree that good PR is neither exclusively global, with no regards to cultural aspects, nor just locally oriented.

International PR has become a 'hot topic' within the last decade or so, receiving a lot of attention from all sorts of specialists trying to untangle its complex dimensions. And a lot of these specialists have gone about the process of defining it, but like in the case of the PR field itself, no unanimous consensus has appeared. No mega-definitions such as the one Rex Harlow designed for PR exists, but attempts to capture the domain's essence have been made. In "Public Relations, Strategies and Tactics", Dennis Wilcox suggests that International PR might represent the "planned and systematic efforts of a company, institution or government to establish mutually beneficial relations with other nation's publics." (Wilcox 2003, p. 378)

Its ascent as a distinct sector of PR was stimulated by factors such a global social-economic changes, new media technologies - everything from computer networks, satellite transmissions, e-mail, Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth to blogs, webcasts or RSS feeds - and globalization. But there are also a series of factors that condition international PR's top position, and local expertise is the key one.

Developing and implementing an international PR campaign is not at all an anathema idea, but doing it without a clear understanding and acceptance of local cultures is. International public relations cannot and should not be separated from international cultural relations. And Carl Botan said it best when stating that "International public relations are intercultural public relations" (Botan, Hazleton, 2006)

If international PR specialists don't adapt their messages to the local public's cultural specifications, these messages will never reach their targets properly. And what better example than Chevrolet's failed attempt at launching Chevy Nova in Latin America. Had they done their research properly and taken cultural aspects into consideration while planning their campaign, they would have learned that 'no va' translates to 'it doesn't work' in Spanish. Now, who in their right mind would want to buy a car that *doesn't work*?

Another factor that proves to be essential for the success of international PR is mass-media. Authors such as  Doug Newsom (2003) or J. Hendrix (2007) have made it clear that an efficient international and intercultural communication process is not possible without the help of local, regional and international mass-media. And let's not forget social media, which plays a vital and essential role in global PR and whose merits have been discussed in a previous post.

To sum up, in today's "Global Village", PR efforts and procedures must be based on a mixture of global processes and local understanding, all assimilated under a very culturally aware, yet broad minded practice.